A form of workers' struggle characteristic of decadent capitalism. It resolves the organization and massive self-affirmation of the workers by spreading spontaneously across the length and breadth of a territory, incorporating all workers regardless of trade, nationality, sex or any other division imposed by the organization of production or by the state.
Origins of the mass strike
With the development of imperialism, in the last decade of rising capitalism, the class struggle intensifies and begins to show new forms all over the world. The first great "mass strike" breaks out in Russia in 1905.
From one end of the country to the other ran a grandiose wave of strikes that shook the body of the nation. According to a rough estimate, the strike spread to 122 cities and towns, to several mines of the Donets and to ten railway companies. The proletarian masses were stirred to their foundations. The movement swept along a million souls. Without any definite plan, often even without formulating any demands, breaking off and starting again, guided only by the instinct of solidarity, the strike reigned over the country for about two months. […]
After January 9, the revolution will know no rest. It no longer confines itself to underground work hidden from view, ceaselessly rousing new strata; it has begun openly and hastily to call up its companies, its battalions, its regiments and its army corps. The main force of this immense host is the proletariat; that is why the revolution calls up its soldiers by means of the strike. […]
One after another, trades, factories and cities stop work. The railwaymen are the initiators of the movement; the railways serve as the conductor of this epidemic. Economic demands are formulated and satisfied almost immediately, in whole or in part. But neither the beginning of the strike nor its end depends exclusively on the demands presented or on the satisfaction obtained.
The strike begins not because the economic struggle has arrived at definite demands but, on the contrary, demands are selected and formulated because the strike is needed. There is a need to show oneself, the proletariat of other places and finally the whole people, the forces that have been accumulated, the solidarity of the class, its fighting ardor; a general review of the revolution has to be held.
The strikers themselves, and those who support them, and those who sympathize with them, and those who fear them, and those who hate them, all understand or vaguely feel that this curious strike, which runs from place to place, regains its impetus and passes by like a whirlwind; all understand or feel that it does not act of its own accord, that it merely carries out the will of the revolution that sends it. Over the field of operations of the strike, that is, over the whole expanse of the country, hangs a menacing, sinister force, charged with insolent daring.
Leon Trotsky. 1905: Results and Prospects, 1906
When Rosa Luxemburg brought the discussion on the model of the "mass strike" to Germany, at a time when class tension was strong, the party reluctantly accepted its "use", subject only to an eventual abolition of the workers' right to vote. The trade unions then refused point-blank. Rosa Luxemburg intervened in the debate, trying to clarify first of all that the mass strike is not the general strike - not in the sense of universality, quite the opposite, but in the sense that it cannot be reduced to a tool, that it cannot simply be "called".
The first thing that the experience of Russia leads us to revise is the general conception of the problem. Today, when all has been said and done, we find that the position of the most fervent advocates of "trying out the mass strike" in Germany, such as Bernstein, Eisner, etc., and that of the most bitter opponents of this idea, such as Bömelburg in the trade union camp, turn out in practice to be the same, that is, the anarchist conception.
For the anarchist way of thinking is direct speculation on the "great Kladderadatsch", on the social revolution merely as an external and inessential characteristic. What is essential to anarchism is the abstract, unhistorical conception of the mass strike and of the conditions under which the proletarian struggle is generally waged.
This capricious way of reasoning led sixty years ago to the conception of the mass strike as the shortest, safest and easiest way to leap into a better social future. The same way of reasoning recently gave rise to the idea that the trade union struggle was the only true "direct action of the masses", and also the only true revolutionary struggle. This, as we know, is the latest position of the French and Italian "syndicalists" [revolutionary syndicalism, which would later mutate into the anarcho-syndicalism of the CNT].
What was always fatal for anarchism is that methods of struggle improvised in the air are like invitations to a house whose owner is absent, that is, they are purely utopian. Moreover, these speculations, which at one time were on the whole revolutionary, by failing to reckon with despicable, vile reality, are in fact transformed by it into instruments of reaction.
Those who today fix a day on the calendar for the mass strike in Germany, as if it were an appointment noted in an executive's diary; those who, like the participants in the trade union congress of Cologne, seek to eliminate the problem of the mass strike from the face of the earth by means of a "propaganda" ban, are guided by these same abstract and unhistorical methods of observation.
Both tendencies rest on the purely anarchist assumption that the mass strike is a purely technical means of struggle that can be "decided" at will and in a strictly conscious way, or that can be "forbidden"; a kind of pocket knife kept closed in one's pocket "ready for any emergency", which can be opened and used whenever one decides. (…)
Therefore, if the Russian Revolution teaches us anything, it is above all that the mass strike is not artificially "made", not "decided" at random, not "propagated"; it is a historical phenomenon which, at a given moment, arises out of social conditions as an inevitable historical necessity. The problem therefore cannot be understood or discussed on the basis of abstract speculation about the possibility or impossibility, the usefulness or harmfulness of the mass strike. One must examine the social factors and conditions that give rise to the mass strike in the present stage of the class struggle.
In other words, it is not a matter of a subjective criticism of the mass strike from the standpoint of what would be desirable, but of an objective investigation of the causes of the mass strike from the standpoint of what is historically inevitable.
Rosa Luxemburg. The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, 1906
But there are elements we should not forget either in the rejection that the mass strike provokes in the social democratic leadership: the 1905 strike has gone beyond the trade union bureaucracy and its fantasy of organizing the proletariat as a pyramidal army. The Russian proletariat has not created trade union confederations; it has created a new type of organ: the workers' council, the soviet. And this organ has gone beyond the unions and placed them under its natural command, without consulting popes or bureaucrats. The worst nightmare for the trade union leadership at a time when the unions are beginning to be integrated into state capitalism.
As the October strike unfolded, the soviet naturally became the center that attracted the general attention of political men. Its importance grew literally from hour to hour. The industrial proletariat had been the first to close ranks around it. The Union of Unions, which had joined the strike from October 14, almost immediately had to recognize the protectorate of the soviet. Numerous strike committees - those of engineers, lawyers, government officials - regulated their actions by the decisions of the soviet. By subordinating the independent organizations, the soviet unified the revolution around itself.
Leon Trotsky. 1905: Results and Prospects, 1906
The mass strike in the 20th century
The mass strike is not a phenomenon confined in time or space. Immediately after the Russian revolution of 1905, we will see it appear in South America, in the famous 1907 Saltpeter Strike*, return to Russia in February 1917 and merge with the world revolutionary wave until 1937, from Spain to China. It will break out again in Italy, Germany, Greece and Vietnam as the basic form of the proletariat's attempts to transform war into revolution.
In 1953 in Germany, it will for the first time put the new Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe in check. From 1962 (the Asturias miners' strike) the mass strike once again holds sway across the world, from Paris to Córdoba and Rosario, from South Africa to Vitoria and from there to the Donbass by way of Poland, respecting neither oceans nor "iron curtains". In the second half of the eighties, the long wave of struggles opened then will be exhausted. However, the revival of the class struggle will again bring the specter of the mass strike to Iran (2017-19), Morocco (2018) and Mexico (2019).